truck accidents
OUT OF NOWHERE
A vaccine might be able to eventually quell a deadly virus but it won’t end the savagery faced by every driver, every day. Few things are uglier or more destructive than a road accident, but the carnage goes beyond the physical and the visible, and the pain far beyond blood and bone. Now, as Australia relies on its trucking industry more than ever to keep the country ticking, we recall a story that brings the risks into stark reality. Steve Brooks writes
I
T WAS EARLY September, 1978. I was just days off turning 26 years of age and as memory reminds me, it was a stunningly bright Spring day. I had one suit, one unstained tie, and wore both to the interview. The big red leather chair felt like it was swallowing me. Across the office, the squat little man sitting behind a desk littered with books and scraps of paper, wanted to know why a young man who’d been formally trained as a journalist, then chopped and changed jobs like a model changes frocks, should be given the job of staff writer on a truck magazine. Not just any magazine, but Truck & Bus Transportation, the highly respected industry title printed every month since 1936. Inept management would ultimately destroy this fine publication soon after the new century rolled in but back in 1978, it was the trucking tome. Anyway, I can’t remember what the answer was, but no doubt littered with carefully concocted claptrap, plus the fact I’d spent some time driving trucks, it must’ve been a reasonably convincing response. Either that or no one else applied.
52 SEPTEMBER 2020
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Nevertheless, I got the job, though I would later discover that my new employer and specifically its editor with the cluttered desk, Geoff Johnson, had grave doubts about my propensity for long-term employment. Whatever, adult life had been a roller-coaster ride up to that point but on that fateful day, my working world finally found substance and satisfaction. Too brash to know it at the time, I was on the cusp of a wonderful career. Sure, there would be times throughout the next 40 years when the pressures of publishing, constant travel and occasional corporate offers would cause a brief escape to something seemingly more settled but like a boomerang, I kept coming back to the career that all started on that remarkable September day. Anyway, all these years later, I was caught unawares recently when a good friend and longtime industry colleague of similar vintage asked: “What’s the most important story you reckon you’ve ever written?” I couldn’t recall anyone asking that before and to be blunt, I hadn’t really thought about it,
either. At least, not until that moment. Even so, two stories came immediately to mind. First, a lengthy feature story written in the late ’80s about truck speed and its role in a dreadful run of fatal crashes. If anyone thinks trucking today is frantic, well, perhaps they weren’t around in the late ’80s when many roads were diabolical and there was no such thing as ‘speed limiting’. The story was called ‘Enough is Enough’ and certainly attracted plenty of attention, even winning an award for automotive journalism. But for me, it wasn’t the most important story. In my mind, that dubious honour would emerge from a self-imposed hiatus in the mid-’90s, in a story I believe to be as relevant today as it was when first published in 1996. Right now, the quote on my desk calendar reads, If not you, then who? If not now, then when? With that in mind, here’s a mildly modified version of that story again. Now, as then, I sincerely hope it might ease the burden for someone and open the door to greater awareness that road accidents create victims of the living and the dead. Truck drivers are no exception.
ownerdriver.com.au
1/09/2020 8:53:18 PM
